The Carbon Sense Coalition today called on the Queensland Government to follow the lead of New Zealand and initiate a complete review of the science and the cost-benefits of the proposals to levy a new tax on coal and petrol usage.

“All over the world, three factors are triggering a revolt against the lemming-like rush led by the Anglo-Saxons to commit carbon suicide via emissions trading schemes,” said Viv Forbes, Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition.

“Firstly, the science behind the scaremongering forecasts from IPCC computer models has been shown to be deficient by a growing band of independent scientists.

Rep. Henry Waxman

In a major win for environmentalists, a committee of House Democratic leaders on Wednesday voted to put Rep. Henry Waxman in charge of a key panel that will have oversight over global warming issues in the new Congress.

The House Steering committee voted 25-22 to put the California Democrat in charge of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, replacing Michigan Democratic Rep. John Dingell, the most senior member in the House.

The House Democratic caucus will vote on Thursday.

The Waxman-Dingell battle has been closely watched on Capitol Hill. Waxman is regarded as an ally of environmentalists while Dingell has ties to the auto industry. He has resisted higher fuel standards and tighter limits on greenhouse gases.

The Heritage Foundation issued a harsh rebuttal to Barack Obama’s latest climate change comments, blasting the president-elect for recycling problematic climate change rhetoric from the campaign trail.

The Washington think tank also criticized Obama’s plans to address global warming, calling the proposals “fear mongering” based on tainted data.

The Heritage Foundation’s statement came in response to comments made at the Global Climate Summit, a meeting arranged by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in Los Angeles earlier this week. More than 600 global climate-change experts convened at the summit to try to break gridlock on environmental issues ahead of next month’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland.

[H/T to Skeptics Global Warming]  Climate change is fading as a priority in the Pacific Rim as the gloomy state of the global economy takes precedence, a survey of opinion leaders showed Wednesday.

The Pacific Economic Cooperation Council, a non-governmental group, released an annual survey of leaders in government, business and media ahead of a summit in Peru of 21 Asia-Pacific leaders.

Twenty-four percent of some 400 opinion leaders surveyed said the top priority for Asia-Pacific leaders should be addressing the US-bred financial crisis, far outweighing other issues.

Last year, the top priority was reviving stalled global trade negotiations, at 12 percent, but climate change came close at eight percent. Global warming did not even figure among the top priorities this year.

IT'S not that I hate nature. It's just that I hate lies. And that's what alarms me most about the "we'll-fry-and-die" green movement.

It tells children that lies are fine, if they're told in the "right" earth-saving cause. What good can come of it?

The latest example is McDonald's new "Happy Meals" promotion, which offers young burger-munchers a soft toy of an "endangered animal".

The fact is that the most endangered animal in this promotion is actually the one whose carcass now lies between two sesame-seed buns.

But check the 10 stuffed animals that McDonald's, with Australia Zoo, have chosen to hand out as animals "endangered" by us wicked humans.

Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson gets around. Last Wednesday, for example, the 85-year-old “retired” physicist regaled a lunchtime audience at the Nassau Club with his “heretical” ideas about global warming. Just a few hours later he could be found once again sharing his thoughts on global warming, as well as on intelligent design, nuclear warfare, extraterrestrial life, and HAR-1 (a DNA component that distinguishes human beings from other animals) with a standing-room-only crowd at Labyrinth Books.

Mr. Dyson’s credentials are venerable: the British-born scholar received a BA from the University of Cambridge in 1945, and was, from 1953 until his retirement in 1994, a physics professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. The absence of a PhD in his resume has been more than compensated for by the 21 honorary degrees he has received over the years.

Weather Station

[H/T to Gore Lied]  ACCURATELY recording the temperature of a body that is not in equilibrium can be complicated.  Recording the average surface temperature of the earth reliably, and with such accuracy that one can know with certainty that there has been a less than one degree Celsius change over one hundred years, probably impossible. 

Dr Vincent Gray explains why, and begins at the very beginning with an explanation of “temperature” and how it is measured:

TEMPERATURE is one of the six basic units of the SI (Metric) system, but is the least understood and most mysterious of all of them.

It originally arose as a method of assessing heat level, which could be measured by the change in length of a liquid inside a glass capillary. The scale was divided into a number of equal units between “fixed” points.

Sunflower Electric Power Corporation has filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court, District of Kansas, against Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, Lt. Gov. Mark Parkinson and Secretary of the Kansas Department of Health & Environment Roderick Bremby, asking for injunctive relief related to the October 2007 denial of an air quality permit for the cooperative's power plant expansion.

The lawsuit asserts that the defendants, acting in their official capacity, have violated Sunflower's right to fair and equal treatment under the law and are unlawfully prohibiting interstate commerce. The case is the result of the denial of an air permit application for a power plant expansion at Sunflower's Holcomb Station in Finney County, Kansas. The lawsuit asks that these three officials be stopped from preventing Sunflower from lawfully pursuing the expansion.

"In denying the air permit, the administration has discriminated against 400,000 Kansans and over 1.5 million citizens from other states who will be forced to pay the price of this decision for decades to come through higher electric rates. We believe we have an obligation to act on behalf of the people we serve and to correct this wrong," said Earl Watkins, president and CEO of Sunflower.

Read rest…

Cash raised from selling carbon allowances to companies to cover their emissions should be used to pay for measures such as improving energy efficiency in homes, a thinktank urged today.

Some 7% of the UK's carbon permits distributed under the new phase of the EU's emissions trading scheme (ETS) will be auctioned, instead of being handed out for free.

The first sale of four million allowances today is expected to raise some £60m for the government, which the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said should be spent on initiatives to meet the UK's climate change obligations.

The think-tank said the UK government should follow the lead of countries such as Austria, Hungary and the Netherlands in using the money for energy and environmental programmes.

Read rest…

Great news for global warm-ongers: New data show the world is on target to meet the Kyoto targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The bad news: It took a major economic collapse to get it done.

The U.N. says the 40 signatories to the Kyoto treaty have, on average, cut their emissions to 5% below their levels of 1990 — just meeting the goals for 2008 to 2012. So on the surface, things look very good.

But the data are deceiving. As the publication the New Scientist noted, "Much of the 17% drop is a consequence of the economic downturn of eastern and central European nations in the 1990s."

Tesla Motors didn't just set out to build an electric car. It set out to teach Detroit a lesson. Back in 2003, when these guys from Silicon Valley were launching their company, they didn't apologize for knowing next to nothing about the automotive industry. In fact, they took pride in this. They were rebels, disruptors, technogeeks operating at Internet speed—and they were convinced they could do better than the lumbering, clueless Big Three. Tesla's lead investor, Elon Musk, a charismatic Web entrepreneur who made a fortune as a cofounder of PayPal, last year boasted to BusinessWeek that "Silicon Valley is the best in the world at everything it does."

Well, five years after its founding, Tesla has shipped about 70 electric roadsters, and the car does in fact turn out to be a classic Silicon Valley product—it's late and over budget, has gone through loads of redesigns, still has bugs and, at $109,000, costs more than originally planned. Tesla's first 40 roadsters went out of the factory with a drivetrain that needs to be replaced. (Tesla will do the rip-and-replace for free.) Its second car, a sedan, has been delayed until 2011. Tesla, based in San Carlos, Calif., has raised $150 million and burned through almost all of it, plus millions more put down by customers in the form of deposits (the company won't give an exact figure). Now, hit by the downturn, Tesla has laid off 20 percent of its staff, closed its Detroit office and borrowed money to stay afloat.

When is $25 billion in taxpayer cash insufficient to bail out Detroit's auto makers? Answer: When the money is a tool of Congressional industrial policy to turn GM, Ford and Chrysler into agents of the Sierra Club and other green lobbies.

That's the little-understood subplot of the Washington melodrama over a taxpayer rescue for Detroit. In their public statements, proponents describe the bailout as an attempt to save jobs, American manufacturing and the middle-class way of life. But look closely and you can see that what's really going on is an attempt to use taxpayer money to remake Detroit in the image of the modern environmental movement. Given a choice between greens and blue-collar workers, Congress puts the greens first.